What the Wedding China Was For
In her dining room cabinet sits the china she received for her wedding.
Picture a woman named Nora, 70, widowed three years. In her dining room cabinet sits the china she received for her wedding. There are twelve place settings, white with a thin blue edge. She used it on Thanksgiving, on two anniversaries and the night her husband retired. Between those evenings it stayed behind the glass.
Nora is moving to a city in Mexico to be near friends. Her daughter Beth, 40, lives in a small apartment with two children and a dishwasher that does not like thin china. Beth said kindly that she had no room for it.
An antique shop offered Nora a small share of what the set had cost. She said no. A friend suggested putting it in a donation box at the church. Nora stood in the dining room with a dinner plate in both hands and could not set it in the box.
She called Beth that evening. "I keep thinking they were for something," she said.
"What were they for, Mom?" Beth said.
Nora thought about it. The china was for the people at the table. It was for the night the whole family came and her husband carved the turkey badly. The plates had been waiting for those evenings. The evenings were what she wanted to keep.
A cousin knew Jade, 27, who had married that spring. She and her husband had four chairs, a borrowed table and mismatched dishes. They hosted dinners for friends every other Sunday. Nora took the china over in the back seat of her car, wrapped in towels. Jade unwrapped one plate and said, "I will use these every other Sunday."
"Please do," Nora said. "They have waited long enough."
The thing and the feeling
| The thing | The feeling it holds | What Nora kept |
|---|---|---|
| Twelve place settings | Family dinners, her husband carving, the laughing | One cup and saucer, wrapped in a scarf |
| The Thanksgiving gravy | The whole family laughing | A page she wrote |
| The cabinet | Waiting for the right evening | A photograph of the table set for twelve |
Before the move, Nora set the table for twelve and took a picture. She wrote the page about the Thanksgiving when the gravy spilled on the tablecloth. She read it aloud to Beth over the phone, and Beth cried, and then said, "I remember the gravy."
In Mexico, Nora drinks her morning coffee from the one blue-edged cup. Jade sent her a photograph of a crowded table, with the plates full.
You could…
- Ask yourself what the thing was for, and write the answer on a page.
- Keep one piece of the set, even if it is one cup.
- Give the rest to someone who will set a table with it this month.
- Read your page aloud to a family member.
What did your good dishes, or your good chair, or your good tools, get saved for? Write to us about it. A reader looking at a cabinet of saved dishes could take your answer as a reminder to use them.
Tell us in the comments